Digital Turn Without Digital Methods? Mapping the Journey of Journalism Studies¶

Abstract

Recent years have seen a growing diversity in the field of journalism studies, which is primarily ascribed to digital transformation in the contemporary context. Analyzing 6770 publications from the five major journalism journals—Journalism, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Journalism Practice, Journalism Studies, and Digital Journalism—over the years 1995-2022, we find new evidence that the digital turn is highly visible in journalism studies. Using document co-citation analysis, first, we have identified many distinct and coherent, yet loosely integrated, research clusters that focus on different journalistic topics, i.e., specialties. Second, we find that digital journalism research has not only been integrated into the research agendas within the field but also formed stand-alone and distinct research clusters. We further show that field structure has developed over the years in response to digital transformation, yet digital and computational methods still remain in the stark minority compared to the more traditional methods. Overall, our results suggest that (digital) journalism studies could potentially benefit from novel inter-cluster communications and methodological innovations


Data source¶

❓ How did we sample journalism research articles ❓

We selected relevant articles by considering the journals they were published in, which included

  1. Digital Journalism
  2. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly
  3. Journalism Practice
  4. Journalism Studies
  5. Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism.

👉 Then, I scraped all the available papers from these journals from OpenAlex and identified all the citation pairs. Additionally, I collected the papers' first published date, i.e., the earliest date between the issue and online dates, and abstracts from web pages associated with the papers' digital object identifiers (DOI).

Data Cleaning¶

  1. remove 1330 book review artcles
  2. remove 69 Newly released
  3. remove 8 Corrections
  4. remove 97 editorial comments and notes
  5. remove 111 information for contributors
  6. remove 9 corrigendum
  7. remove 4 commentaries and 2 letters

after removing a total of 1630 articles

Total number of papers retained in the analysis: 6770


🔎Lets take a look at the dataset!¶

source doi
0 Digital Journalism 843
1 Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 1369
2 Journalism Practice 1237
3 Journalism Studies 1677
4 Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism 1644

Data validity checks¶

⚠️ Note that many papers have 0 citations or reference

10 papers were randomly sampled in each case.

  1. For the uncited papers, 8 out of 10 were truly uncited.
  2. As for the unreferenced papers, the information was missing on the webpage.

For papers with only one reference, the majority of the missing sources were non-research papers such as reports, presentations, news articles, books, and foreign language books.

5811         https://doi.org/10.1177/1077699019827962
5820       https://doi.org/10.25384/sage.c.5066754.v1
6719    https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2021.1882868
5801         https://doi.org/10.1177/1077699016630320
3194    https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670x.2022.2029541
5876       https://doi.org/10.1177/107769900107800213
4469    https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2021.2024083
6682     https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2014.946310
5894       https://doi.org/10.1177/107769900408101s02
3296    https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670x.2022.2139745
Name: doi, dtype: object
4626       https://doi.org/10.1177/107769909907600102
5070       https://doi.org/10.1177/107769909707400105
5215         https://doi.org/10.1177/1077699013493792
5405       https://doi.org/10.1177/107769900908600208
3131     https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670x.2012.662411
6685    https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2016.1168614
5327         https://doi.org/10.1177/1077699015574098
2066          https://doi.org/10.1080/146167000441385
5523       https://doi.org/10.1177/107769900308000211
5136       https://doi.org/10.1177/107769909707400103
Name: doi, dtype: object
['https://doi.org/10.1080/17512780802280984',
 'https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670x.2012.662413',
 'https://doi.org/10.1080/14616700902987207',
 'https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2014.943930',
 'https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884909102591',
 'https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884908098322',
 'https://doi.org/10.1080/14616700701504666',
 'https://doi.org/10.1177/1077699016646790',
 'https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884914529210',
 'https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2012.740242']

🔢Document co-citation analysis¶

The undirected co-citation network analysis is employed as the de facto standard to unveil the intellectual structure in bibliometrics.

👉 So, lets build the network and cluster it

  • To build a CC network, we need to match the received citation

Total number of citation links related to the corpus: 260018

Total number of outgoing citation links: 141975; Total number of incoming citation links: 152229, including external citations: 118043 and internal citations: 34186

Total number of co-citation links: 513194

Network analysis¶

The co-citation network:
5723 nodes 305193 links
Average clustering coefficient 0.44611421787663147
Average degree 106.65490127555478
Giant connected component  5717 nodes faction 0.999

After building the networks,

  • we filter the links to reduce the number of links that are otherwise too dense for community analysis
  • we then apply several community detection algorithms: Infomap and Leiden
Co-citation network after filtering (α=0.2)
number of nodes after filtering:  4349 0.76
number of edges after filtering:  40778 0.134
percentage of weights after filtering:  0.416
Average clustering coefficient 0.461
Average degree 18.753
Giant connected component: 4280 nodes faction 0.984
Infomap
n_clusters and modularity (169, 0.472)
Leiden
n_clusters and modularity (47, 0.572)

CC network¶

RQ1: What are the most prevalent journalism research clusters, and how are they related to each other ❓

Wordcloud for the clusters using abstracts+ titles¶

⚠️ 6333 (94%) abstracts are available, whereas some abstracts (437 of 6770, 6%) are not available
(6333, 47)
Text Preprocessing¶

Word Collocation

professional-identity 33.69013773409274
20th-century 600.0715818516247
united-states 498.2504853281565
mainstream-media 10.31576517472804
journalistic-norm 15.38824101909386
content-analysis 38.583370937364485
past-year 40.09285677710072
news-production 10.587752052501889
journalistic-practice 15.274491512907677
user-generated-content 72.61922330311252
article-conclude 14.135704970773782
english-language 638.2761881470612
new-technology 16.00920761245675
article-explore 12.036187057395017
public-relation 40.249044374004384
news-organization 11.78571995299071
starting-point 474.6348077350523
study-examine 14.58785897871036
finding-suggest 37.0578229370404
rely-heavily 210.28577993697476
real-world 30.898664721918358
case-study 22.36480327565222
presidential-campaign 79.29727868420787
middle-east 1320.582560296846
media-system 12.229149242964434
news-item 11.914921945040424
journalistic-professionalism 21.53505905702391
article-argue 13.357154715203052
discursive-construction 28.310052977393134
important-role 10.581366484973913
everyday-life 175.2866470596513
article-examine 14.111079191640071
public-opinion 35.752660627138496
information-processing 32.08447148974532
social-media 17.105087352510033
empirical-evidence 74.36941023182634
ethnic-minority 32.591300366300366
paradigm-repair 467.6229027693552
cultural-capital 25.74610561851941
journalistic-field 17.418062472592872
emotional-labor 19.532243016299876
theoretical-framework 64.1284742555971
textual-analysis 57.86134147342062
journalistic-authority 10.312372128884007
native-advertising 264.22792541972495
web-site 59.54359010108052
boundary-work 22.673269192190286
shed-light 875.4230796261157
past-decade 187.13608547295408
foreign-correspondent 210.55955266955266
news-outlet 10.264447480898706
new-york 148.1762844053509
foreign-correspondence 199.71773288439957
in-depth-interview 178.34949302131602
answer-question 125.16043829936882
pay-attention 28.141850916942914
user-comment 37.6578883451369
take-place 100.65511358452694
government-official 10.798992611472698
times-washington 211.25662841313812
investigative-reporting 32.24631328342727
print-online 16.559606828161805
base-interview 10.03082694422895
professional-norm 10.797392286545096
digital-age 45.83973421624857
democratic-society 13.702517133103466
role-conception 56.68052237617455
previous-research 48.18149276588064
united-kingdom 454.5774053124104
n-= 740.6674779541446
increase-number 11.962645988845768
news-consumption 13.860700588408132
online-experiment 12.447735705596106
sexual-violence 103.73256491785904
hierarchy-influence 43.39479660422795
online-harassment 13.905436269025166
point-view 24.627277759837618
general-election 47.05271483929792
online-survey 10.85922325244953
result-indicate 51.84356483959897
well-understand 55.51801059406814
los-angeles 3703.4027055150887
media-outlet 10.520774151750311
asylum-seeker 2281.3910256410254
public-debate 12.677760218654267
different-type 26.45091044221479
national-survey 17.25352078535935
ordinary-people 22.19547230999501
press-freedom 60.206158631999884
recent-year 117.4906564494508
political-economic 12.109665016417429
public-affair 33.807360583078044
business-model 58.758693561501914
article-present 10.074053205918178
bourdieu-field 82.09850057670127
public-sphere 79.75069676008154
hard-news 11.404941645443008
study-investigate 14.284745000327376
european-union 200.12483306389262
reader-comment 26.19572566441471
exploratory-study 16.950166693125894
seek-understand 23.119442582227695
fake-news 21.309379632476144
attention-pay 58.448459596727595
wide-range 209.19393919602913
letter-editor 97.3773417884504
political-actor 18.96848169467217
daily-newspaper 23.815170237410943
world-wide 13.289160225533026
survey-data 15.584305660241917
analytical-framework 78.50438222405224
political-economy 25.323465708081095
production-process 24.113227016051997
investigative-journalism 14.685778152170196
information-flow 13.683083429450212
mass-communication 117.82136406140192
blind-spot 861.0411290322581
technological-innovation 13.486183082446782
high-level 71.82033457197333
telephone-survey 24.047094594594594
implication-finding 17.731607267412894
significant-difference 37.05646214717074
wire-service 83.0138551968651
19th-century 381.8637339055794
agenda-set 25.545029479620613
result-reveal 15.733126889213716
social-network 12.646090646508009
popular-culture 15.051186023344549
financial-crisis 34.503231574638605
journalism-education 15.006373696778091
professional-standard 11.447682460034097
civil-society 126.60267507766737
vox-pop 3900.6095993953136
perceive-credibility 26.838498543790305
field-theory 24.85175409195017
journalistic-autonomy 12.164398224102698
help-explain 19.517128128884448
fourth-estate 1655.3348837209303
latin-america 839.5918780015165
latin-american 102.29619871134638
quantitative-qualitative 67.97116119174943
election-campaign 96.22795509316404
human-right 98.10760042005775
representative-sample 67.46048731734216
special-issue 101.03458940951471
21st-century 743.0861848973437
current-affair 115.7902099970423
particular-attention 10.886878293635895
address-gap 37.59475352112676
mass-media 11.709449233401328
result-suggest 19.314713334403415
presidential-election 224.9563411440697
future-research 13.259803746543987
public-interest 17.023514555490713
qualitative-interview 29.885963807364487
tell-story 13.766178006420917
large-scale 345.01979692841473
ordinary-citizen 95.49419874167285
intermedia-agenda-setting 176.1575647582907
young-adult 149.78829966329965
raise-question 52.06070630861759
focus-group 32.145843227635474
little-attention 19.730739050705786
collective-memory 268.0235610543303
web-2.0 38.015060884426404
interview-conduct 25.057449246650837
factor-influence 15.167542698964184
social-capital 22.136201920684677
positively-relate 47.76713493199714
positively-associate 70.94528057410545
theoretical-methodological 25.713614819952603
comparative-analysis 18.029581279348438
european-country 32.77817819899581
climate-change 97.62383829148025
television-station 62.235115618828175
young-people 72.19133417998378
selective-exposure 385.4201862681395
grow-body 15.4630257212374
literary-journalism 12.028796349758482
discourse-analysis 14.628155501773438
big-data 41.459541949162414
digital-technology 14.822571496568957
data-collect 58.62186396532732
power-relation 10.704362572937056
public-service 51.233716123584855
new-zealand 99.844407239819
south-africa 329.9869162087912
south-african 171.10432692307694
media-landscape 16.98982396064676
paper-examine 11.969912553989946
facebook-twitter 39.74548825158581
audience-engagement 23.19859131340108
et-al 1037.0966488586691
long-term 118.28847149758454
play-important 30.010889926215935
world-war 53.37946384353944
quantitative-content 37.679665443252404
high-profile 169.51822811709962
emotional-response 34.57132746801365
web-analytic 79.22466470031722
practical-implication 96.70627484526744
conceptual-framework 86.79316978882527
challenge-face 25.03802366270249
semi-structured-interview 194.80881316150166
article-analyse 12.325486212988995
man-woman 33.91433199923766
radio-station 42.05329079522628
constructive-journalism 16.18399508882775
social-networking 27.910863291298075
status-quo 527.2548148148148
male-female 97.42261762189905
strong-predictor 18.116723792717277
role-performance 17.13661362979766
mental-health 138.78569909245604
mental-illness 602.8065718157181
finding-discuss 10.518474099861091
iraq-war 36.25774902580037
facebook-page 46.27648231622746
finding-indicate 45.34198734680687
job-satisfaction 453.8250964984836
terrorist-attack 77.35770178235039
analysis-reveal 10.770535461476564
production-distribution 27.769740948813983
washington-post 484.9558848577755
little-know 86.13363451182865
metajournalistic-discourse 178.92929763146134
provide-insight 28.113407762388753
news-making 11.487206798295384
participant-observation 65.5358289051402
structural-equation 62.470949622608394
individual-level 32.31928242976612
base-in-depth 19.473240483415367
political-party 14.058992314874668
high-quality 14.576881856223249
second-level 23.281784581166388
discursive-strategy 11.230081346990035
critical-discourse 35.20992574095803
freelance-journalist 16.76004607810819
comment-section 81.62775229357798
digital-native 15.998966059788716
press-release 88.4865905675389
peace-journalism 13.37913643585396
donald-trump 1031.9178479381444
low-level 60.695612403100775
high-school 37.10051543406498
civic-engagement 53.39972037510656
hong-kong 2963.0647548566144
legacy-media 10.181599614589306
methodological-approach 13.720360327944691
watchdog-role 13.927906139444602
internal-external 37.36451443569554
fill-gap 296.800685693106
health-crisis 16.304337142666757
protest-paradigm 32.61369988545246
black-life 11.592232693476939
similarity-difference 12.767147366910605
al-jazeera 2506.3169014084506
frame-building 27.08500761035008
virtual-reality 62.94605588963566
arab-spring 579.7154879869689
finding-reveal 15.845266068751947
agenda-setting 888.9194264569843
blur-boundary 152.09273504273503
contextual-factor 10.512080576559546
war-correspondent 20.459729807415926
news-avoidance 13.754213302986148
african-american 69.27050285698397
thematic-analysis 19.842151522207537
advertising-revenue 41.8425453743846
live-experience 14.084680950001731
mediatization-politic 41.14178371192416
south-korea 544.96728125
middle-class 235.38161375661375
conspiracy-theory 94.63547958214625
decision-making 1482.9041666666667
discuss-implication 10.592908237675235
machine-learning 78.11611062335382
online-offline 10.961132156826512
knowledge-gap 38.27975974819981
mass-shooting 12.838070846259289
well-understanding 25.684347808157035
working-condition 18.978136831440303
theoretical-practical 49.45636574951363
human-interest 52.00402876496435
good-practice 10.386347922129234
positive-negative 17.603267769112822
representative-survey 18.703295795795796
agenda-building 362.8382535460993
paper-argue 14.663193849139107
give-rise 13.94526076564398
cold-war 85.93086519114688
supreme-court 585.838683127572
small-town 170.44875478927202
digital-era 22.79852663519892
paper-explore 14.42242171303469
negative-emotion 25.306206614581942
south-korean 111.21781250000001
audience-member 12.679838407990134
random-sample 172.31592325848817
experiment-n 45.395025510204086
mixed-method 432.97726153578776
global-south 56.619977272727276
macro-level 119.95180316818336
associated-press 37.01399866877444
non-governmental-organization 47.1413514485212
cross-national 671.0247146351406
data-collection 28.472215555448887
artificial-intelligence 1339.397311827957
u.s-newspaper 10.03170052709857
civil-right 91.86809499225608
domestic-violence 10.903707107843138
ethical-dilemma 40.033408323959506
third-person-perception 23.293212906603834
mobile-device 65.30220183486239
sexual-harassment 193.07886170842377
echo-chamber 413.35307781649243
agenda-setting-effect 22.535734780216956
york-times 921.1490993839739
long-form 10.096368794326242
slow-journalism 16.33076171095683
covid-19-pandemic 410.37274596426886
coronavirus-pandemic 269.8419492693686
message-credibility 16.71550590445518
fact-check 801.4570021111892
twentieth-century 1241.057135193133
search-engine 855.0078078078078
information-subsidy 36.184153957879445
presidential-candidate 36.272345543121546
twenty-first-century 763.7274678111588
nineteenth-century 636.439556509299
war-ii 206.87060138609436
fact-checking 33310.556650246304
visual-framing 10.430010784704475
time-spend 48.30015380903553
long-standing 263.6274074074074
short-term 22.64455991516437
peer-review 13.252047959487637
semi-structured 1542220.3333333333
fact-checker 6662.111330049262
wide-web 20.857821016233956
third-person-effect 71.36316013735369
new-notable 25.988421906693713

Some corpus-specific stop words

[('news', 11367),
 ('journalism', 7798),
 ('media', 6839),
 ('journalist', 6687),
 ('study', 5039),
 ('newspaper', 2797),
 ('article', 2591),
 ('coverage', 2341),
 ('political', 2209),
 ('research', 2196),
 ('practice', 2193),
 ('role', 2160),
 ('use', 2050),
 ('analysis', 1921),
 ('journalistic', 1885)]

Total number of terms: 522362, number of unique terms: 26134

RQ2: How are topics related to the digital aspects reflected in journalism research clusters ❓

TF-IDF¶
  1. First, we calculate the TF for each word which is the count of each word in a given cluster.
  2. Then we calculate the IDF, inverse document frequency, which is a measure of how much information a word provides, i.e. if it's common or rare across all clusters [1].

We have

$${\text{idf}(t,D) = \log{\frac{N}{ 1+|\{d\in D : t\in d\}|}}}$$
Top ten articles in each cluster based on each paper's normalized citation impact (NCI)¶
Cluster 1
A Look at Agenda-setting: past, present and future (McCombs, 2005);
What's in a Frame? A Content Analysis of Media Framing Studies in the World's Leading Communication Journals, 1990-2005 (Matthes, 2009);
Quantitative analysis of large amounts of journalistic texts using topic modelling (Jacobi, Atteveldt, Welbers, 2015);
Candidate Images in Spanish Elections: Second-Level Agenda-Setting Effects (McCombs, Llamas, López-Escobar, Rey, 1997);
Issues and Best Practices in Content Analysis (Lacy, Watson, Riffe, Lovejoy, 2015);
A Longitudinal Study of Agenda Setting for the Issue of Environmental Pollution (Ader, 1995);
Agenda Setting and International News: Media Influence on Public Perceptions of Foreign Nations (Wanta, Golan, Lee, 2004);
Think about it This Way: Attribute Agenda-Setting Function of the Press and the public's Evaluation of a Local Issue (Kim, Scheufele, Shanahan, 2002);
INTER-MEDIA AGENDA SETTING AND GLOBAL NEWS COVERAGE (Golan, 2006);
The Effects of Message Framing on Response to Environmental Communications (Davis, 1995);


Cluster 2
PARTICIPATORY JOURNALISM PRACTICES IN THE MEDIA AND BEYOND (Domingo, Quandt, Heinonen, Paulussen, Singer, Vujnovic, 2008);
Perceptions of Internet Information Credibility (Flanagin, Metzger, 2000);
A CLASH OF CULTURES (Hermida, Thurman, 2008);
Between tradition and change (Mitchelstein, Boczkowski, 2009);
Wag the Blog: How Reliance on Traditional Media and the Internet Influence Credibility Perceptions of Weblogs Among Blog Users (Johnson, Kaye, 2004);
Cruising is Believing?: Comparing Internet and Traditional Sources on Media Credibility Measures (Johnson, Kaye, 1998);
Virtuous or Vitriolic (Santana, 2013);
The Microscope and the Moving Target: The Challenge of Applying Content Analysis to the World Wide Web (McMillan, 2000);
PREPARING FOR AN AGE OF PARTICIPATORY NEWS (Deuze, Bruns, Neuberger, 2007);
The political j-blogger (Singer, 2005);


Cluster 3
Defining “Fake News” (Tandoc, Lim, Ling, 2017);
What is News? (Harcup, O'Neill, 2016);
Fake News and The Economy of Emotions (Bakir, McStay, 2017);
Truth is What Happens to News (Waisbord, 2018);
SHARE, LIKE, RECOMMEND (Hermida, Fletcher, Korell, Logan, 2012);
More Than Just Talk on the Move: Uses and Gratifications of the Cellular Phone (Leung, Wei, 2000);
The Digital Architectures of Social Media: Comparing Political Campaigning on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat in the 2016 U.S. Election (Bossetta, 2018);
Key Dimensions of Alternative News Media (Holt, Figenschou, Frischlich, 2019);
The Impact of Trust in the News Media on Online News Consumption and Participation (Fletcher, Park, 2017);
Hard and soft news: A review of concepts, operationalizations and key findings (Reinemann, Stanyer, Scherr, Legnante, 2011);


Cluster 4
What is journalism? (Deuze, 2005);
The objectivity norm in American journalism* (Schudson, 2001);
MAPPING JOURNALISM CULTURES ACROSS NATIONS (Hanitzsch, Hanusch, Mellado, Anikina, Berganza, Cangoz, Coman, Hamada, Hernández, Karadjov, Moreira, Mwesige, Plaisance, Reich, Seethaler, Skewes, Noor, Yuen, 2010);
The personalization of mediated political communication: A review of concepts, operationalizations and key findings (Aelst, Sheafer, Stanyer, 2011);
The framing of politics as strategy and game: A review of concepts, operationalizations and key findings (Aalberg, Strömbäck, Vreese, 2011);
MEDIA(TED) DISCOURSE AND SOCIETY (Carvalho, 2008);
Understanding the Global Journalist: a hierarchy-of-influences approach (Reese, 2001);
Modeling Perceived Influences on Journalism: Evidence from a Cross-National Survey of Journalists (Hanitzsch, Anikina, Berganza, Cangoz, Coman, Hamada, Hanusch, Karadjov, Mellado, Moreira, Mwesige, Plaisance, Reich, Seethaler, Skewes, Noor, Yuen, 2010);
Psychology of News Decisions (Donsbach, 2004);
Between Rhetoric and Practice (Mellado, Dalen, 2013);


Cluster 5
IN DEFENSE OF TEXTUAL ANALYSIS (Fürsich, 2009);
Beyond journalism: Theorizing the transformation of journalism (Deuze, Witschge, 2017);
Between creative and quantified audiences: Web metrics and changing patterns of newswork in local US newsrooms (Anderson, 2011);
Journalism beyond democracy: A new look into journalistic roles in political and everyday life (Hanitzsch, Vos, 2016);
THE JOURNALISTIC GUT FEELING (Schultz, 2007);
THE JOURNALIST IS MARKETING THE NEWS (Tandoc, Vos, 2015);
The Audience-Oriented Editor (Ferrer-Conill, Tandoc, 2018);
Boundary Work, Interloper Media, And Analytics In Newsrooms (Usher, Holton, 2018);
News selection criteria in the digital age: Professional norms versus online audience metrics (Welbers, Atteveldt, Kleinnijenhuis, Ruigrok, Schaper, 2016);
News Startups as Agents of Innovation (Carlson, Usher, 2015);


Cluster 6
An Emotional Turn in Journalism Studies? (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2019);
The Effect of Narrative News Format on Empathy for Stigmatized Groups (Oliver, Dillard, Bae, Tamul, 2012);
360° Video Journalism: Experimental Study on the Effect of Immersion on News Experience and Distant Suffering (Damme, All, Marez, Leuven, 2019);
The strategic ritual of emotionality: A case study of Pulitzer Prize-winning articles (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2012);
What is Slow Journalism? (Masurier, 2014);
Disaster News (Houston, Pfefferbaum, Rosenholtz, 2012);
Emotion aside or emotional side? Crafting an ‘experience of involvement’ in the news (Peters, 2011);
DIGITALITY, VIRTUAL REALITY AND THE ‘EMPATHY MACHINE’ (Hassan, 2019);
Virtual Reality, 360° Video, and Journalism Studies: Conceptual Approaches to Immersive Technologies (Mabrook, Singer, 2019);
Re-imagining crisis reporting: Professional ideology of journalists and citizen eyewitness images (Andén-Papadopoulos, Pantti, 2013);


Cluster 7
What Is News? Galtung and Ruge revisited (Harcup, O'Neill, 2001);
Social media as public opinion: How journalists use social media to represent public opinion (McGregor, 2019);
A COMPROMISED FOURTH ESTATE? (Lewis, Ae, Franklin, 2008);
WHAT ARE FINANCIAL JOURNALISTS FOR? (Tambini, 2009);
JOURNALIST–SOURCE RELATIONS, MEDIATED REFLEXIVITY AND THE POLITICS OF POLITICS (Davis, 2009);
Effects of Victim Exemplification in Television News on Viewer Perception of Social Issues (Aust, Zillmann, 1996);
The Unified Framework of Media Diversity: A Systematic Literature Review (Loecherbach, Möller, Trilling, Atteveldt, 2020);
The American Journalist in the Digital Age: Another Look at U.S. News People (Weaver, Willnat, Wilhoit, 2018);
LOOK WHO'S TALKING (Dimitrova, Strömbäck, 2009);
Citizen sources in the news: Above and beyond the vox pop? (Kleemans, Schaap, Hermans, 2016);


Cluster 8
Algorithmic Accountability (Diakopoulos, 2014);
Measuring Message Credibility (Appelman, Sundar, 2015);
Clarifying Journalism’s Quantitative Turn (Coddington, 2014);
Algorithmic Transparency in the News Media (Diakopoulos, Koliska, 2016);
On the Democratic Role of News Recommenders (Helberger, 2019);
Burst of the Filter Bubble? (Haim, Graefe, Brosius, 2017);
The Robotic Reporter (Carlson, 2014);
Automation, Journalism, and Human–Machine Communication: Rethinking Roles and Relationships of Humans and Machines in News (Lewis, Guzman, Schmidt, 2019);
Mapping the field of Algorithmic Journalism (Dörr, 2015);
Actors, Actants, Audiences, and Activities in Cross-Media News Work (Lewis, Westlund, 2014);


Cluster 9
TWITTERING THE NEWS (Hermida, 2010);
NORMALIZING TWITTER (Lasorsa, Lewis, Holton, 2011);
TWITTER AS A REPORTING TOOL FOR BREAKING NEWS (Vis, 2012);
SOCIAL MEDIA AS BEAT (Broersma, Graham, 2012);
#JOURNALISM (Hermida, 2013);
TWITTER AS A NEWS SOURCE (Broersma, Graham, 2013);
Reciprocal Journalism (Lewis, Holton, Coddington, 2013);
Personal Branding on Twitter (Brems, Temmerman, Graham, Broersma, 2016);
Twitter’s influence on news judgment: An experiment among journalists (McGregor, Molyneux, 2018);
RESEARCHING NEWS DISCUSSION ON TWITTER (Bruns, Burgess, 2012);


Cluster 10
Does a Crisis Change News Habits? A Comparative Study of the Effects of COVID-19 on News Media Use in 17 European Countries (Aelst, Toth, Castro, Štětka, Vreese, Aalberg, Cardenal, Corbu, Esser, Hopmann, Koc-Michalska, Matthes, Schemer, Sheafer, Splendore, Stanyer, Stępińska, Strömbäck, Theocharis, 2021);
MOBILE NEWS (Westlund, 2012);
Communal News Work: COVID-19 Calls for Collective Funding of Journalism (Olsen, Pickard, Westlund, 2020);
Conceptualizing “Dark Platforms”. Covid-19-Related Conspiracy Theories on 8kun and Gab (Zeng, Schäfer, 2021);
Effects of Exposure to COVID-19 News and Information: A Meta-Analysis of Media Use and Uncertainty-Related Responses During the Pandemic (Chu, Yeo, Su, 2022);
Still Unwilling to Pay: An Empirical Analysis of 50 U.S. Newspapers’ Digital Subscription Results (Chyi, Ng, 2020);
Content for Free? Drivers of Past Payment, Paying Intent and Willingness to Pay for Digital Journalism – A Systematic Literature Review (O'Brien, Wellbrock, Kleer, 2020);
Paying for Online News (Fletcher, Nielsen, 2016);
The Coronavirus Pandemic as a Critical Moment for Digital Journalism (Quandt, Wahl-Jorgensen, 2021);
Restructuring Democratic Infrastructures: A Policy Approach to the Journalism Crisis (Pickard, 2020);


RQ3: How are the field development and structure related to the journals ❓


Network evolution¶

Across 5 periods: 1995-2004, 2005-2009, 2010-2014, 2015-2019, 2020-2022

RQ4: How has the field structure evolved over time ❓

Period 1:
431 nodes 2009 links
Average clustering coefficient 0.6143922574647204
Average degree 9.322505800464038
Network density 0.022
Giant connected component  391 nodes faction 0.907
Period 2:
1045 nodes 13113 links
Average clustering coefficient 0.5505707800249496
Average degree 25.096650717703348
Network density 0.024
Giant connected component  1032 nodes faction 0.988
Period 3:
2127 nodes 44838 links
Average clustering coefficient 0.508974181882512
Average degree 42.160789844851905
Network density 0.02
Giant connected component  2123 nodes faction 0.998
Period 4:
3431 nodes 112469 links
Average clustering coefficient 0.49817845339652855
Average degree 65.56047799475371
Network density 0.019
Giant connected component  3415 nodes faction 0.995
Period 2 after filtering (α=0.2):
number of nodes after filtering:  587 0.562
number of edges after filtering:  1527 0.116
percentage of weights after filtering:  0.329
Average clustering coefficient 0.483
Average degree 5.203
Giant connected component: 485 nodes faction 0.826
Period 3 after filtering (α=0.2):
number of nodes after filtering:  1369 0.644
number of edges after filtering:  5850 0.13
percentage of weights after filtering:  0.379
Average clustering coefficient 0.442
Average degree 8.546
Giant connected component: 1319 nodes faction 0.963
Period 4 after filtering (α=0.2):
number of nodes after filtering:  2376 0.693
number of edges after filtering:  14961 0.133
percentage of weights after filtering:  0.394
Average clustering coefficient 0.458
Average degree 12.593
Giant connected component: 2310 nodes faction 0.972
Leiden cumulative
CC1: n_clusters and modularity (26, 0.657)
CC2: n_clusters and modularity (45, 0.727)
CC3: n_clusters and modularity (42, 0.561)
CC4: n_clusters and modularity (44, 0.543)
Top three articles in each cluster based on degree¶
Cluster 1
Cruising is Believing?: Comparing Internet and Traditional Sources on Media Credibility Measures
Interactivity, Online Journalism, and English-Language Web Newspapers in Asia
Perceptions of Internet Information Credibility


Cluster 2
News Media, Candidates and Issues, and Public Opinion in the 1996 Presidential Campaign
Old-Growth Forests on Network News: News Sources and the Framing of An Environmental Controversy
The Sound Bites, the Biters, and the Bitten: An Analysis of Network TV News Bias in Campaign ′92


Cluster 3
The objectivity norm in American journalism*
National News Cultures: A Comparison of Dutch, German, British, Australian, and U.S. Journalists
Understanding the Global Journalist: a hierarchy-of-influences approach


Cluster 4
The Interaction of News and Advocate Frames: Manipulating Audience Perceptions of a Local Public Policy Issue
The Effects of Message Framing on Response to Environmental Communications
Constructing Reality: Print Media's Framing of the Women's Movement, 1966 to 1986


Cluster 5
Doing the Traditional Media Sidestep: Comparing the Effects of the Internet and Other Nontraditional Media with Traditional Media in the 1996 Presidential Campaign
Forecast 2000: Widening Knowledge Gaps
Interactions and Nonlinearity in Mass Communication: Connecting Theory and Methodology


Alluvial diagram¶


Method patterns¶

I used an original dictionary of method terms based on the literature and my previous work.

👉 So, lets detect method terms in the abstract

method detect number:  3892 ,  method detect percentage:  0.57

RQ5: What are the most used methods in journalism research ❓

[('interview', 1200),
 ('survey', 784),
 ('content analysis', 782),
 ('qualitative', 448),
 ('experiment', 403),
 ('case study', 389),
 ('quantitative', 285),
 ('observation', 171),
 ('textual analysis', 141),
 ('comparative study', 135),
 ('discourse analysis', 130),
 ('ethnography', 122),
 ('focus group', 101),
 ('statistic', 91),
 ('mixed method', 81),
 ('framing analysis', 56),
 ('correlation', 49),
 ('exploratory study', 46),
 ('longitudinal study', 43),
 ('fieldwork', 43),
 ('regression', 39),
 ('questionnaire', 38),
 ('thematic analysis', 34),
 ('representative sample', 29),
 ('network analysis', 26),
 ('computational method', 26),
 ('structural equation', 21),
 ('cluster analysis', 21),
 ('factor analysis', 21),
 ('machine learning', 17),
 ('topic model', 16),
 ('close reading', 15),
 ('time series analysis', 14),
 ('critical analysis', 12),
 ('visual analysis', 11),
 ('grounded theory', 10),
 ('conversation analysis', 10),
 ('meta analysis', 10),
 ('secondary analysis', 9),
 ('action research', 8)]

Number of methods: 93

RQ6: How are (digital) methods related to the different journalism research clusters❓

method detect number:  2642 ,  method detect percentage:  0.61